Wichita Tries to Retie Joint-Use Knot
The Wichita, Kansas, neighborhood of Planeview is fighting to resurrect a joint-use agreement between Colvin Elementary School and the Wichita Public Library in which the school library doubled as the area’s only branch for 25 years—until WPL abruptly pulled out March 28. The deal-breaker was the library’s need to cut $17,100 in expenses as part of the city council’s effort to close a $9.5-million budget shortfall, a decision that council member Paul Gray compared to his “trying to find 25 cents lying around for my home budget.”
What particularly irks neighborhood leaders is that Planeview’s closing leaves only two branches to serve the city’s entire south side, where 33% of Wichita’s residents live. School officials and newly inaugurated Wichita Mayor Carlos Mayans have vowed to find an alternate solution to the revenue gap, with Mayans donating all the money in his pocket ($20) May 11.
Meanwhile, 27 Colvin 3rd-graders have e-mailed the Oprah Winfrey Show asking for $115,000 to buy some 10,000 children’s books that WPL officials plan to remove from the school collection by 2006. (The city-owned adult collection has already been removed and dispersed systemwide.) “Please have people donate money for our books,” wrote 10-year-old Vanessa Gonzalez. “We do not want to read the same books over and over.”
City library Director Cynthia Berner-Harris explained in the May 11 Wichita Eagle that the Planeview branch was targeted for closure “because it wasn’t being used,” citing circulation of only 12,000 nonschool-related items in 2002 as proof. But Colvin School Librarian Chris Hockett noted that when students’ borrowing is factored in, Planeview’s 2002 circulation total soars to 81,400, with 67% of the youngsters’ choices being from the city-library portion of the collection.
Posted May 19, 2003.
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